MetaX - why is it rewriting the entire file??

I'm trying to tag my movie collection and MetaX insists on completely rewriting the entire file instead of just updating the tags. At this rate it would take forever to tag my entire 800gb collection so it's pretty much worthless for me. 1) Why on earth would they make it rewrite the whole file? 2) Is there anything with the same capabilities that doesn't?

Welcome to the world of obsessive-compulsive media library organization. Yes, it always takes that long, and I've never seen any kind of program that can just 'insert' tags like you're asking and like I'd love. In every case that I know of, it rewrites the file (and usually trashes the original). So for a ~350MB TV show on my system that's about 10 seconds. Not terrible, but when you're talking 1.5GB for a movie, that's a little more painful.

Yes, it always takes that long, and I've never seen any kind of program that can just 'insert' tags like you're asking and like I'd love.

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Crape. I think I'll just end up passing then. I don't understand why (or am at least very skeptical) iTunes can update the tags without rewriting the entire file but MetaX can't. My assumption (but again, I'm still skeptical) is that there just aren't enough bytes at the beginning of the file to fit the extended metadata that MetaX can write, but I'm not sure that should matter and I'm not sure the tags are at the beginning of the file. The truly silly part is that iTunes can't write the extended tags it can read. Thanks for the input.

I was under the impression that iTunes doesn't actually tag the file, just adds the tags to its database - so if you use the file in another program it will appear untagged.

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No, it adds the tags to the file itself. You can test it by setting a tag on a song and dragging it into another version of iTunes.

iTunes adds tags to the start of the song/movie. But if you look at the contents of a movie using a hex editor, you'll see a large number of 00 bytes at the "description" tag. This looks to me to be "reserved" space, and iTunes might poke the contents directly into the byte on disk. The fact that the length of description is limited shows this is likely.

MetaX adds more tags than iTunes, so there's unlikely to be space reserved for the contents (note that MetaX's short description is limited to the same size as iTunes description), so it'll need to rewrite the file to disk.

Nothing is going to be able to do this any other way, since the bytes in the file are being moved up to make room.

Look at this way; it's a one-time operation. When you get your 800GB movie library set up, you won't have to do it again.

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